More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
May 31, 2024
Let’s have a little bit of truth. Most of us do not need any other diet than a little bit of discipline.
Regular exercise, a balanced diet, and regular sleep are three of the easiest ways to increase our passion, energy, and enthusiasm for life.
no man is an island unto himself. We are social beings—and relationship brings out the best in us.
One of our most dominant emotional needs is our need for acceptance.
we can survive without the nurturing acceptance provides. But we cannot thrive without it.
We have a great need to be accepted. We need to belong. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why so many people join gangs and cults.
People don’t join gangs because they see a great future in it. They see them as a way to survive. People join gangs because it gives them somewhere to belong. People join cults for the same reason.
The truth about friendship is this: We learn more from our friends than we ever will from books. Sooner or later, our standards come to rest with the standards of our friends.
Intimacy is measured by self-revelation. The more you share yourself with others (and vice versa), the more intimacy you will have. The more you hide yourself from others (and vice versa), the shallower your relationships will be. If you are unwilling or unable to share your self, you must resign yourself to low-level relationships.
Learn to waste time with the people you love.
the nature of our knowledge has become increasingly more specialized. The trend is for our professional knowledge, and in many cases training, to become more and more specific. A narrower base of knowledge necessarily creates a narrower worldview.
As Mark Twain wrote, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”
In the silence, we see at one time the person we are now and the person we are capable of becoming. In seeing these two visions at one time, we are automatically challenged to change and grow and become the-best-version-of-ourselves. It
is precisely for this reason that we fill our lives with noise, to distract ourselves from the challenge to change.
“All of man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”
The reason most of us neglect our legitimate needs is that we are too busy pursuing our illegitimate wants. We
You never can get enough of what you don’t really need.
Each day at around lunchtime, for example, I have a desire for six chocolate doughnuts. It is a desire, but a shallow one.
The shallow desire has only one thing in mind, the instant gratification of pleasure.
The only way to say no to anything is to have a deeper yes.
the more we contribute to helping others become the-best-version-of-themselves, the more progress we make in the attainment of our essential purpose.
our everyday lives distract us from our deepest desires. We get busy and tired, and fatigue makes cowards of us all. Once fatigue sets in, we seek instant gratification and begin to operate from our shallow wants again.
